The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

What About the Fish?

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-08-16

"On the one hand, I don't want to know what the fish has to do with Boris Johnson's love life...but on the other hand I have to know!" Mark R. writes.

18 comments - Last comment @ 19:48

A Devil With a Date

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-08-15

Jim was adding a feature to the backend. This feature updated a few fields on an object, and then handed the object off as JSON to the front-end.

Adding the feature seemed pretty simple, but when Jim went to check out its behavior in the front-end, he got validation errors. Something in the data getting passed back by his web service was fighting with the front end.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-16

A Loop in the String

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-08-14

Robert was browsing through a little JavaScript used at his organization, and found this gem of type conversion.

//use only for small numbers
function StringToInteger (str) {
    var int = -1;
    for (var i=0; i<=100; i++) {
        if (i+"" == str) {
            int = i;
            break;
        }
    }
    return int;
}

37 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-16

Nullable Knowledge

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-08-13

You’ve got a decimal value- maybe. It could be nothing at all, and you need to handle that null gracefully. Fortunately for you, C# has “nullable types”, which make this task easy.

Ian P’s co-worker made this straightforward application of nullable types.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-15

Internship of Things

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2019-08-12

Mindy was pretty excited to start her internship with Initech's Internet-of-Things division. She'd been hearing at every job fair how IoT was still going to be blowing up in a few years, and how important it would be for her career to have some background in it.

It was a pretty standard internship. Mindy went to meetings, shadowed developers, did some light-but-heavily-supervised changes to the website for controlling your thermostat/camera/refrigerator all in one device.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-13

Intentionally Obtuse

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-08-09

"Normally I do pretty well on the Super Quiz, but then they decided to do it in Latin," writes Mike S.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-12

Swimming Downstream

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-08-08

When Java added their streams API, they brought the power and richness of functional programming styles to the JVM, if we ignore all the other non-Java JVM languages that already did this. Snark aside, streams were a great addition to the language, especially if we want to use them absolutely wrong.

Like this code Miles found.

13 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-10

Seven First Dates

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-08-07

Your programming language is PHP, which represents datetimes as milliseconds since the epoch. Your database, on the other hand, represents datetimes as seconds past the epoch. Now, your database driver certainly has methods to handle this, but can you really trust that?

Nancy found some code which simply needs to check: for the past week, how many customers arrived each day?

16 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-14

Bunny Bunny

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-08-06

When you deploy any sort of complicated architecture, like microservices, you also end up needing to deploy some way to route messages between all the various bits and bobs in your application. You could build this yourself, but you’ll usually use an off-the-shelf product, like Kafka or RabbitMQ.

This is the world Tina lives in. They have a microservice-based architecture, glued together with a RabbitMQ server. The various microservices need to connect to the RabbitMQ, and thus, they need to be able to check if that connection were successful.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-14

A Truly Painful Exchange

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-08-05

Java has a boolean type, and of course it also has a parseBoolean method, which works about how you'd expect. It's worth noting that a string "true" (ignoring capitalization) is the only thing which is considered true, and all other inputs are false. This does mean that you might not always get the results you want, depending on your inputs, so you might need to make your own boolean parser.

Adam H has received the gift of legacy code. In this case, the code was written circa 2002, and the process has been largely untouched since. An outside vendor uploads an Excel spreadsheet to an FTP site. And yes, it must be FTP, as the vendor's tool won't do anything more modern, and it must be Excel because how else do you ship tables of data between two businesses?

43 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-14

Choice is but an Illusion

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-08-02

"If you choose not to decide which button to press, you still have made a choice," Rob H. wrote.

20 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-14

Close to the Point

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-08-01

Lena inherited some C++ code which had issues regarding a timeout. While skimming through the code, one block in particular leapt out. This was production code which had been running in this state for some time.

if((pFile) && (pFile != (FILE *)(0xcdcdcdcd))) {
    fclose(pFile);
    pFile = NULL;
}

39 comments - Last comment @ 2019-08-14

Recent Articles